Common Sense

This is one of those times when I actually get to say something knowledgeable about someone famous who has passed away.

I had the good fortune to actually meet Lady Bird Johnson a couple of years ago at a taping of Texas Monthly Talks. Evan Smith was interviewing Jim Lehrer because he had a new fiction book out and because, well, he’s Jim Lehrer.

In attendance was Lady Bird Johnson and some of the Johnson family.

After the taping, everyone had the chance to mingle, to eat some sweets and drink some coffee, to buy a copy of the book and get it autographed (which I did) and to hover around the American icon that was Lady Bird Johnson.

You could see that she was tired. Just being around all these people was taking a lot out of her. Then she did the most amazing thing: She made a joke that made everyone around her crack up. I can’t remember the joke for the life of me, but it was genuinely hysterical. It wasn’t just one of those polite laughs you get in deference to someone famous; it was funny.

And with that, her grand-daughter or niece, I can’t remember who it was that was there with her, wheeled her out on a high note.

Just being around someone like that makes life more rich. You could see the fire in her soul, though she was in the twilight of her life. You could see the youthful version of this person locked away inside the old flesh. It’s both sad and hopeful at the same time.

Our soul never really grows old with us. Some where inside us, we are always at our prime. Like a picture, we can stay a certain way forever, even when the body weakens and gives out.

Is that proof that there really is a soul and an afterlife? I don’t know. But I’d like to think it was more than mere electro-chemical reactions inside her brain that made that funny joke and had much younger men and women envying her wit and her humor that day.